Syncing up the MIME databases

[Thomas Leonard]

On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 01:13:35PM -0500, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> Thomas Leonard <tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk> writes:
> 
> > Originally by a script, but it should be done by hand now since there have
> > been changes made to it since then.
> 
> Oh yuck.  What about moving to an intltool-like setup so we can at least
> move the translations out.  Putting the translations in the file makes
> you vulnerable to the first person who edits the file with a non-UTF8
> safe editor.

Even if we have the translations in a separate file, anyone editing it
with a non-UTF8 editor will still mess it up. True, we could set the
charset to something else, but then anyone *with* a UTF-8 editor will mess
it up, so I'm not seeing the advantage...

If might make for less CVS conflicts, though, and it would make it more
obvious which translations are missing. Go ahead and split it if it seems
worthwhile.

> > There are lots of should-be-x-escaped ones. The policy was not to change
> > anything if lots of people were using them already. For the inode/* stuff
> > we should be OK. I think it unlikely that IANA will create an 'inode'
> > group, but even if they do, we'd be exceptionally unlucky if they then
> > created a subtype 'directory' with a different meaning ;-)
> 
> That doesn't mean we can just stomp all over a global namespace.  We
> shouldn't go around creating our own toplevel content-type.

The x- prefix idea doesn't work, though, because we're just as likely to
hit someone else using the same x- prefix as we are. We could do
xdg.inode/directory, but that would mess up a load of software and themes
for very little benefit. There are some types (eg text/doc) which could
end up registered as almost anything, but inode/directory is pretty clear,
to the extent that if such a type was actually registered, we'd be more
likely to be incompatibile due to using a different type that to using
the same one.

What do other people think? Types migrating from (eg) audio/x-midi to
audio/midi seem to cause more problems than just using audio/midi in the
first place, when the name is well-known. Vender tags are useful when
inventing new formats, but seem out-of-place for things like 'directory',
which we didn't invent...


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk	tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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